Friday, February 20, 2009

MSI to Bring Out the GTX260 with 1792MB of Memory

Double that of current offerings

Micro Star International has managed to become one of the major players in the graphics card market, by constantly releasing custom-designed versions of some of the most high-end GPUs out there. One of the company's upcoming products will come in the form of a custom designed GeForce GTX260 graphics card, which will likely provide users with a more powerful alternative to the current offering on the market. This new card will boast a total of 1.8GB of memory, double that of what is available on reference cards.

Apparently, the card will be built on a red PCB, which is rather ironic, given that most Radeon-based graphics cards use the same coloring for their PCB. It will be dubbed N260GTX Lighting, which should provide some perspective as to what to expect from this high-end desktop graphics card. It will boast an 8+2 phase power design and will use a dual-slot, dual-fan custom cooling solution, to effectively eliminate the heat over the GPU. Said cooler will also feature five heatpipes, which should further enhance its cooling factor.

Unfortunately, there aren't any technical details available at this time, aside from the fact that the upcoming card will be featuring an impressive 1792MB of GDDR3 memory, double the amount that is featured on reference cards. However, given the cooling potential of the double-slot, double-fan cooler of said card, MSI will likely be playing a bit with the its frequency levels, further enhancing its performance capabilities. If that is not the case, then users will be given the opportunity to tweak the card for themselves, with the help of the company's bundled AirForce panel.

The upcoming MSI N260GTX is based on one of NVIDIA's mainstream cards of the moment, the GeForce GTX260. Despite no official release date, we could be seeing the new card at the upcoming CeBIT computer show, due to start on March 3, in Hanover, Germany.